Custom Theming Questions
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I am in the process of designing a custom theme for a website running on WPMU 2.8.4 with an install of BuddyPress 1.1.1. I don’t have much need for the multi-user aspect of WPMU, but went with this as my “CMS” because of the social networking components BuddyPress can bring to the table. At least in the near term I will only be using one blog with a pretty extensive home-page involving some content managed through WordPress and some pages that are essentially independent.
So I have built a theme for the main WordPress blog completely from scratch. Now I’m scratching my head as to how I’m going to integrate the BuddyPress features I need into the areas of the theme where I need them. My strategy so far has been to take all the files in the BuddyPress parent theme that weren’t present in my custom theme, move them into my custom theme folder, then dissect the core template files from the BuddyPress parent theme (header.php, home.php, etc.), extracting the BuddyPress elements, and placing them into my template files where necessary.
Here is the current result – http://boxmediasolutions.com/wpmuTest/
It seems to be going along okay at the moment, but I’m thinking there has to be a better way to go about this, so I have a couple of questions for the community if anyone cares to offer advice.
1) Is there an easier way to do this kind of thing that already has good documentation that I’m just overlooking?
2) Can I move the div#search-login-bar out of the header, placing it essentially atop the content div in only a few specific pages (ie – the ones that involve connecting with the community)?
3) Is there documentation somewhere explaining the template hierarchy of WPMU and BuddyPress, how they interact, and what is exactly being called for by commands like do_action( ‘bp_before_search_login_bar’ ), do_action( ‘bp_after_search_login_bar’ ), do_action( ‘bp_before_header’ ), etc?
4) Can commands like the ones mentioned in question 3 be reversed, like calling for the before/after search login bar after the before/after header actions?
I am quite comfortable editing/developing WP themes and template files, though I am completely new to BuddyPress and WPMU, and I am not really well versed in PHP coding, just to give you a bit of background.
Thanks a ton in advance for any advice!
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